


While You Were Sleeping

by leonidaslion



Series: Horse To Water [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M, M/M, Wincest - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-09
Updated: 2011-04-09
Packaged: 2017-10-17 19:04:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/180198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leonidaslion/pseuds/leonidaslion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Sam tries to deal in a Deanless world...</p>
            </blockquote>





	While You Were Sleeping

The day he finally realizes that he isn’t going to get Dean back, Sam spends three hours alternating between sobbing and puking in the toilet of his motel room. In the end, he only manages to stop when his exhausted body shuts down and drops him into darkness. He comes to with the scent of magnolia in the air, and a woman’s thigh pillowing his cheek, and fingers in his hair.

“Shh,” she says. “Shh, it’s okay.”

“R-Ruby,” he chokes out, and then starts crying again. He knows it’s her: _has_ known for these past two months while she shadowed his every move, never quite daring to come close enough for him to drive her old knife through her gut. His own gut crawls, now, as she holds him. The smell of magnolia is cloying: too strong to cover up the sulfur scent that seems to be everywhere he turns these days. He tries to puke again and dribbles a thin stream of bile onto her thigh.

Ruby doesn’t appear to notice: still stroking his hair from his face like a mother, or maybe a lover. Sam can’t help comparing her touch to Dean’s, and the violence of his reaction—chest clenching, heart seizing up, every single muscle in his body contracting like he was just electrocuted—takes him by surprise.

He blacks out again.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

The next few days pass in an agonizing blur. Ruby nurses him, forcing him to eat and drink and all but carrying him into the bathroom when he has to piss or puke.

On the third day, Sam remembers that he has a gun. Hell, he has about fifteen of the fuckers. He pushes to his feet on his own steam for the first time since he has understood that Dean is dead and damned and not coming back and digs one out of his bag. He shoves it in his mouth, ignoring Ruby’s watchful position from the chair in the corner, and slides his finger around the trigger.

If he can’t bring Dean to him, then he’s going to Dean.

From the corner, Ruby says quietly, “If you do this, then Lilith wins.”

Sam almost doesn’t care. He almost has enough of Dean in him not to care.

But, in the end, it turns out he’s his father’s son after all.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Later, after he has put the gun away and shaved for the first time in several weeks, Sam stares into the bathroom mirror—stares at the amulet around his neck—and says, “When she’s dead, I’m done.”

Ruby laughs from her place in the doorway. “Hell, Sam, when the bitch is dead, I’ll punch your clock for you if you want.”

Still staring into his own, empty eyes, Sam shakes his head. “I’ll do it myself.”

“I’ll make it painless, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

It isn’t. Sam just wants to wind up in the right place, and he’s worried that taking Lilith out, and then being killed by a demon in turn, might be just enough to tip the scales in his favor. It might be just enough to save him: enough to send him, demon-tainted and cursed, to wait out eternity in Heaven while Dean—a good man: the _best_ of men—rots in the Pit.

And how fucking ironic would that be?

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

She climbs on top of Sam in the night like a succubus.

She whispers, “You need this,” and bites his ear hard enough to draw blood.

The first time he shoves her off, and the second, but three is the lucky number and he folds. He doesn’t know who he hates more when he thrusts into her, himself or Ruby, but she’s right. He needs it.

He needs it because he can’t kill himself, and he can’t afford to slice his own body up the way he wants to either. But he still needs to be punished: needs his own personal slice of Hell to hold him over until his task is done.

For now, Ruby’s going to have to do.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

She teaches him. She teaches him to embrace the lightning inside of him instead of fearing it: teaches him how to wield the weapon he has been given.

He teaches himself how to push through the pain, and how to move through an empty world without weeping, and how to function with a constant, hollow ache in his chest.

It's one hell of a learning curve, but Sam has always been a good student.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

The fifth time they fuck, it slips past his salt-slick lips: a hurt, broken whimper of a name. To be honest, he wasn’t trying very hard to hold it in. There's no need for secrecy anymore, after all: not with a demon his only companion.

Afterward, Ruby bites at his chest and rubs his sore, spent cock and offers, “You know, Sam, I could find someone who looks like him …”

Sam punches her for the suggestion until his knuckles are bloody and swollen. Then he remembers that there’s a person in there somewhere and makes himself stop. He doesn't quite care enough to patch her up, though, or help her to her feet.

When he showers, it’s to the sound of Ruby’s laughter. That black, jagged noise—or maybe the understanding that beating Ruby didn’t feel any different than fucking her—leaves Sam’s insides cracked and wasted. His heart is a badland: naked bedrock and dry, twisted husks of trees stretching up toward a dead sky.

Ruby is gone by the time he emerges again, and when she returns the following night she’s wearing Dean’s cologne and an oversized leather jacket. She hasn’t switched bodies, looks nothing like him: looks nothing like _herself_ with her face swollen the way it is. Her split lips quirk in a smirk and something in Sam snaps.

He tosses Ruby into the wall hard enough to crack the plaster and then holds her there with one hand around her throat while he yanks her pants down and opens his own. He fucks her up against the wall: eyes scrunched shut as he pants out his brother’s name with every thrust. Ruby’s fingers dig into his back like hooks, dragging him down. She writhes and purrs on his cock, asking for it harder and deeper and faster, make it hurt, c’mon, Sam, _fuck me_.

It isn’t what Sam wants to hear—her voice ruins the illusion worse than her cunt or her breasts or her too-long hair—and he pauses in his litany long enough to growl, “Shut up.”

“Make me,” she shoots back, and Sam does: getting his hand back around her throat and squeezing until she’s struggling for air.

When he comes, it’s with Dean’s scent in the air and a bitter, bloodied taste in his mouth.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Dean comes back and Ruby sees him first. Ruby sees him when she’s freshly fucked and half naked and has Sam’s come still soaking inside of her. When she has Dean’s name still vibrating along her skin.

Sam can feel her eyes on him when he pulls his brother into his arms— _Deanwholesafehere **mine**_ —and for the first time, he wants to kiss her. He wants to kiss her for keeping him alive until Dean could find his way back to him. He wants to kiss her because he knows full well that he can’t kiss Dean.

“So,” she says when they part, playing the innocent bystander, “Are you two together?”

Her habit of easy lies has rubbed off on Sam over the months, though, and he puts on his own mask: spins the barb away. As he speaks, he takes in the flick of her eyes and the tight pull of her lips and he understands that she’s jealous.

Her words are a threat of sorts, and Sam knows that she’ll tell Dean if he doesn’t—tell him about the fucks and just whose name Sam always yelled when he came—but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because Dean is here, and he pulled himself out of Hell somehow for Sam, and Sam is going to keep his brother this time. He’s going to keep Dean if he has to pull the trick to managing it from Ruby’s body strip by bloody strip.

 _Any means necessary,_ he promises himself, and shuts the door in her face.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

“You should leave Dean,” she tells him two days later when they meet again in a shadowed diner. “You’re a different person now, Sam. You're dangerous to him: running around half-cocked with all that power flowing through you. It isn't something you can just stuff back inside the bottle, you know.”

Sam rubs his fingers against the sticky spot on the booth’s table—an old maple syrup spill, probably—and thinks about the man Dean left behind when he died: broken and sobbing, too weak to go on by himself. Too afraid to reach out for the one thing he wanted above all else.

Some things have changed since then. Some things haven’t.

Sam’s not afraid of himself anymore. He knows what he wants, and over the past day or so he has begun to think it isn’t inconceivable that Dean wants it too. But he’s just as weak as ever when it comes to being alone, and he knows that the fragile grip he’s maintaining on his sanity will slip for good if anything ever takes his brother away again.

He's going to need the power crackling underneath his skin to keep that from happening.

“I don’t want to bottle it back up,” he admits.

Ruby just looks at Sam for a moment—like she didn’t expect that answer and doesn’t quite know how to take it—and then asks, “Are you going to tell him that you want to fuck him?”

Sam smiles softly, turning his head to look out the window. The bodies on the floor are starting to smell, but his thoughts are full enough with Dean that he doesn’t really mind.

“I’ll do better than that,” he says. “When the time is right, I’ll _show_ him.”


End file.
